In our local tests PHP 7.1 performs slightly better than 7.0, the focus of the new release was more towards new features and improvements, not necessarily around execution performance. Those interested in upgrading to PHP 7.1 can check the migration guide at http://php.net/manual/en/migration71.php.

As always, before doing any changes to your website, we recommend testing your site fully first before just changing the PHP version and leaving it. PHP 7 has many breaking changes from older versions that can cause major issues with your website. Please check with your application developer before making any changes to confirm compatibility.

We hope everyone enjoys the new release! If you have any questions, concerns or comments, please let us know.

We’ve announced the availability of our Nix Bunny stickers for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch running iOS 10 and with this announcement, we’d like to offer our Apple customers a chance to use our new iMessage stickers and earn a free credit!

We are very pleased to announce the availability of our Priority Fast-Track support! Fast-Track support will allow our customers to pay to upgrade their ticket to high priority, moved to the top of the queue as well as a guaranteed 15-minute response time. Many customers have asked for a priority response time capability and this is the answer!

Why upgrade my ticket? Some customers have urgent issues that must be addressed quickly without delay, upgrading tickets to Priority Fast-Track promises the customer that they will get a response within 15 minutes and that we are working to address the issue in question to get it resolved as fast as possible.

How does it work? Once you’ve opened your ticket, you will be presented with the option to upgrade the ticket to First-Track. Once the option is enabled, you will be forwarded to the invoice to complete payment. Once the invoice has been paid, the ticket will be upgraded to high priority and all staff members assigned to the support department for your ticket will be notified immediately. Please note that not all departments (such as sales and billing) offer Fast-Track support.

We’ve already had several uses of this new system and the response has been great! Most issues were responded to and resolved within 3 minutes!

We will be migrating our TS01-GA TeamSpeak services to another data-center located in Atlanta. The current host will remain online while we synchronize the 2 servers. Once completed, we will shutdown the old host and bring up the new host. There will be a delay in connecting to the new server (up to 1 hour) for DNS propagation to complete since the IP address of the host will change.

The new IP of the server is 23.226.236.22. Moving away from our previous data-center will stop the outages related to the data-center routers being constantly under DDOS attacks and other issues related to filtering, high latency, packet loss etc.

We’d like to thank everyone for their patience during this time while we work to improve our TeamSpeak services in Atlanta.

Thank you for choosing ASPnix!

UPDATE: The migration has completed. We are seeing improved latency times from various test locations, some locations as much as 15ms less!

We are pleased to announce our new Virtual Cloud Server plans that will allow our customers more flexibility in building the exact virtual server that is required. No more pre-built plans that are not flexible, no more having to pay for 100s of GB of space when all you needed was more RAM. Pay only for what you need!

Our new cloud platform is powered by Samsung Data-Center class SSD drives for maximum speed, over 1,000,000 IOPS performance! Powerful Intel Xeon processors up to 16 cores, and DDR4 memory up to 32GB! Our new platform starts at $20 per month for a Windows VPS!

Those that love Linux can now enjoy it on our Hyper-V cloud platform as well! CentOS, Fedora Server, Red Hat, Ubuntu Server and Debian are all now supported! Get started with a Linux VPS today for only $10 per month.

Customers who are interested in starting their own hosting company or just want to make managing their Linux server a little easier can purchase our cPanel Control Panel addon.

Now is a perfect time to purchase a VPS and start hosting your own web site, database, point-of-sale system and much more! Customers all around the world trust their Virtual Cloud Server operations to us and our growing and expanding network! So why not give our new Virtual Server plans a try, and see how a VPS can benefit you today!

Today we are very pleased to announce support for Let’s EncryptTM SSL certificates! We are also one of the first Windows hosting providers to support Let’s Encrypt! Our Linux cPanel systems also support Let’s Encrypt for all paid accounts. This new-comer to the certificate world has gained popularity extremely quick offering completely free of charge website SSL certificates. We know security is important to our customers and many do not want the additional cost of purchasing an SSL certificate, renewing it every x years can be a pain. Configuring the SSL certificate can also be troublesome for many non-technical users as well.

Not anymore! Let’s Encrypt is a fully automated one-click SSL certificate installation. Even renewals are handled automatically! No more having to reissue or rekey certificates, generating new CSRs and all that other “fun” stuff! Let’s Encrypt certificates are valid for 90 days and are automatically renewed 7-days before the certificate expires, customers will be emailed a report for each certificate once renewed.

Anyone can take advantage of this new feature and install SSL on your website today! All you need is a dedicated IP address which can be purchased through our billing system by clicking “Manage” next to your hosting account and then selecting “View Available Addons”.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact our sales department.

Thank you for choosing ASPnix!

The Let’s Encrypt logo is a trademark of the Internet Security Research Group. All rights reserved.

The primary SmarterMail server (MX01) uses dual power supplies for redundancy in case of a single PSU failure. After contacting Supermicro we were notified that the internal power distribution unit that the dual power supplies plug into had failed causing the server to receive no power. This is not a component that is stocked at our data-center and not something that can be picked up locally and must be ordered directly from Supermicro.

The server is currently operational, but using a standard ATX power supply. Once we’ve received the replacement part from Supermicro, maintenance will be scheduled to replace it so that the server can be restored to full working order.

We’d like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding during this time and for choosing ASPnix!

We are very pleased to announce support for the new .NET Core 1.0! All web servers have been updated with the ASP.NET Core 1.0 runtime as well as the IIS modules, customers can start deploying ASP.NET Core web applications immediately!

The new runtime improves performance by focusing and optimizing your web application to run on the web server and the cloud environment. As well as the ability to run your application across platforms such as Windows, Linux and macOS.

.NET Core is available for those who’d like to start developing or deploying ASP.NET Core applications right now, simply select “No Managed Code” in the control panel for your website’s ASP.NET version and then publish your application.

We are proud to support .NET versions from 2.0 all the way to 4.6.1, including the new .NET Core 1.0.

At 3:31PM UTC (06/01/2016) our Level 3 Data Center in Denver experienced a network outage that resulted in the full loss of service for nearly all services.

Timeline (times are UTC)

3:31PM Outage occurred

3:40PM Technician dispatched to verify local equipment

3:48PM Technician verified local equipment functionality

3:50PM Ticket opened with Level 3

4:05PM Ticket escalated to tier 1 support

4:22PM Ticket updated that Level 3 was investigating the cause of the outage

4:37PM Ticket updated to notify that equipment has been verified and that the fiber connections are good

4:42PM Ticked escalated to tier 2 support

5:20PM Ticket updated to notify that the connection is being reset/ rebuild

5:40PM Ticket updated to notify that our services should be back within 1 hour

6:38PM Ticket updated by ASPnix to notify that network was still offline

7:05PM Ticket escalated to tier 3 support

8:48PM Ticket updated to notify that the issue had been resolved and our services would be restored within minutes

8:51PM BGP connection reestablished on both ASPnix routers and service restored

Root Cause

ASPnix uses 2 private AS numbers provided by Level 3 to allow for BGP routing between our routers and the Level 3 edge routers that service our circuits. This allows for failover between routers in the unfortunate event that one fails. Due to an outstanding order that was tied to our account, their system automatically closed the order and marked our AS numbers as inactive. Within 5 – 7 minutes their routers received the updated configuration and notified that these routes are now inactive and were removed resulting in all traffic to and from our network to be unroutable.

Because of the missing AS numbers under our account, the tier 2 support technician assumed we did not use BGP and rebuilt our connection without it. Our routers are configured for BGP and advertise BGP, as a result they were unable to establish a connection and advertise our IP routes to the edge router.

Tier 3 support was able to see that our configuration was invalid and we provided our BGP information and previous AS numbers. The technician was able to restore the BGP routes and within minutes our service was back online.

Credits

We will be issuing credits to all customers in the next few days. Credits will be automatically applied to each account based on any active service(s). This excludes domains and service addons.

If you have any questions or concerns, please open a ticket to the technical support department for your service.

We’d like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding during this time and for choosing ASPnix!

Our TS01-UT TeamSpeak server is currently experiencing an unexpected outage. We are working with our upstream provider to find the cause is and resolve it. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this.